LATER HISTORY OF THE MIDLAND SYSTEM 1 23 



considerable and had manifested itself as a change of field systems. 

 Although relatively few of the maps that accompany the awards 

 give accurate pictures of the old fields, enough of them do so to 

 illustrate the situation. The plans of the Chiltern townships 

 may, for the time, be disregarded. Since the midland system 

 did not prevail in that region, irregular fields, such as these plans 

 show, were to be expected there. We shall return to them later.^ 

 In the rest of the county, an area once entirely given over to 

 the two- and three-field system, a diversity of field arrangement 

 had arisen between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth. 

 Occasionally an award or a plan shows the two simple old fields 

 bearing the old names. The Kencott award of 1767 quotes the 

 act to the efifect that there were " by estimation in the two open 

 common fields, the East field and the West field, about 731 acres." 

 All the allotments at Hook Norton and Southrop in 1774 were 

 in either the Northside field or the Southside field. At Arncott, 

 in 18 1 6, there were 533 acres in the West field and 555 in the 

 East field. The Taynton award and plan of 1822 have, besides 

 the common, only the two large fields. East and West. These 

 four townships He in the Cots wold uplands, where the two-field 

 system was once almost universal. That only one-half of their 

 arable was cultivated yearly after the middle of the eighteenth 

 century may seem incredible; yet there is nothing in the awards 

 to show that field conditions had changed since the thirteenth 

 century. We have, indeed, found the Charlbury agreement of 

 1 7 15 declaring that the owners and occupiers of lands in the open 

 fields " upon each others Lands there every other year have right 

 of common." We have, too, the definite statement of Richard 

 Davis, who made the first report on Oxfordshire to the Board of 

 Agriculture in 1794. " Some open fields," he says, " are in the 

 course of one crop and a fallow, others of two, and a few of three 

 crops and a fallow. In divers uninclosed parishes the same rota- 

 tion prevails over the whole of the open fields; but in others the 

 more homeward or bettermost land is oftener cropped, or some- 

 times cropped every year." ^ 



1 Cf. below, Chapter IX. 



2 General View of the Agriculture of the County of Oxford (London, 1794), P- n. 



